Posts Tagged ‘Thrifty’

I became super overwhelmed with the art teaching and gave up on the lesson plan posting, which I will resume in September. I eventually volunteered over 1500 hours at Whitman Elementary last year, and SCRAP donated $140 worth of art materials, which was enough to keep 370 students happy and learning the whole year long. Here are some photos of projects we worked on during the third trimester:

Clay dishes drying before they get kiln fired. It was the first time most of the fourth and fifth graders had ever worked with clay and they did a beautiful job.

Third graders were studying plants, so we made scientifically accurate flowers with stamens, anthers, sepals etc. We dyed coffee filters with liquid watercolor for the petals, and wired them to leftover faux floral stems I found in the bottom of the bin at SCRAP.

We dyed the coffee filters before cutting them up into flower petals; the kids had a good time watching the colors seep and blend.

Third graders created a plant shaped rubber stamp out of recycled shoe rubber Nike creates for sport courts. We used acrylics and brayers to ink the stamps to make colorful prints.

A student inks her rubber stamp.

Ribbons, mat board leftovers, colored pencils and old fashioned scientific illustrations from a fish book I found at a garage sale made a great study of shape and color for second graders.

Students were challenged to reproduce one of the fish illustrations in colored pencil on their tiny mat board. We glued a scrap ribbon loop on the back for a hanger.

Second graders were studying animal habitats, and we used oil pastel on cut up file folders and added scrap paper collage details to show an animal they were studying in its natural habitat.

I found animal head stickers with silly googly eyes in a box of free things I found on Craigslist. I thought the students would like the challenge of filling in the rest of the art piece dictated by the animal head.

Fourth and fifth graders used discarded Halloween colored aersol hairspray to create “spraypaint” effects as part of their solar system collages. It was all the fun of applying spray paint without the fumes and stains and mess.

Kindergarteners assemble their invented animal collages using the paintbrush and watered-down glue system that worked so beautifully all year long.

This project is appealing to all ages and demographics! The 4th and 5th graders made stick journals since much of what modern people know about Colonial History is from what people of that era wrote down, either formally, in diaries or journals, or in letters to others. The 2nd graders made journals since we were studying letter writing, and writing in a journal can be like writing a letter to yourself.

They are super simple to make and really use up a lot of actual stuff destined for the trash/recycle bin. You need:

Rubber bands

something to serve as the stick (soda straw, chopstick, dead pen with the ink cartridge removed, handle of a toothbrush, paintbrush that’s yucky since someone forgot to wash it out, a stick from the yard, etc.)

waste paper cut to 8.5″x5.5″ for the front and back covers (old calendar pages, folders, cardboard inserts, posters from events long passed, and so on)

hole punches (I like the 2 hole punches used for legal files – SCRAP gets in tons of that particular size when filing systems go digital)

filler paper (paper from the recycle bin that’s been used on 1 side)

Fold the filler paper in half horizontally so it’s the size of covers. Stack 5 sheets, printed sides on the inside. Layer with a front and back cover. Hole punch on the side opposite the folds (this is the hardest part to get people to follow directions – if you do it this way, it hides the printed side of the paper forever), poke looped ends of the rubber band through the holes, and use the stick to hold the rubber band loops. Done.

I sometimes collate and stack pre-printed paper headed for the recycle bin and run it back through the copier so it has lines on it instead of being blank, or graph paper squares – or you might just want it blank for an art journal.

Sarah Morgan at SCRAP showed me how to do this and it’s such a cool, universally interesting project! Add more pages or take some out as needed. You can modify this project in many ways to change it up – kids think of all kinds of cool things to personalize it.

Here is how I’m handling glue, since it doesn’t often come into SCRAP as a donated material. If you already have a set of class glue bottles that you can refill with one of those wompous gallon jugs, super.

I got this idea from The Art of Teaching Art to Children by Nancy Beal. Her book describes how she teaches art but many of her lessons involve having classes of 12 kids at a private school in her actual art room, so you might guess much of it didn’t translate to my current situation; however, the glue idea in particular is genius.